Aquabots Autonomous Vessels

Ever since 2013, the Aquabots Team at RDM Rotterdam has been involved in the development of autonomous vessels for purposes of monitoring and inspection. The majority of these projects carried out by students with different educational backgrounds. Together with trained professionals in the maritime sector, they worked on all kinds of interdisciplinary assignments involving (semi-) autonomous vessels with a hull size of approximately two metres.

Along with these projects, we slowly but surely developed a web-based Aquabots Client in order to remotely control these vessels. In this project, we will be showing you how to change a remotely controlled boat into an autonomous vessel, that can register itself to this client, using little more than an Arduino (Mega), a GPS unit and some time to spare!

In the coming weeks, I will adding a number of blogs to the project, for every step in making the autonomous vessel!

The code source is available on GitHub.

Project:

Day 1: Connecting to the Aquabots Client

Day 2: Adding a GPS Unit

Day 3: Updating the GPS location

Day 4: Revving the Servo's!